Or Are We Still Leaning
by FigureofDismay
Summary: She copes through it all by not coping but reacting. Directly post 2.18, Liz in the aftermath, the first 18 hours after the shooting. Soon to be AU, a little bit of wishful thinking. Complete but may get a sequel. Red/Liz pairing.


("Did I ever need you? Did I ever fight you, Did I ever want to? Did I ever leave you, was I ever able? Or are we still leaning across the old table?" - Leonard Cohen, _Did I Ever Love You_)

* * *

She copes through it all by not coping but reacting without registering the scene playing out in front of her. She watches her hands reach out to staunch the flow of blood from Red's chest, her creamy wool scarf growing heavy and damp and sticky with it, and the blood trickling down from his mouth and some part of her training tells her they must have hit a lung and somewhere in the back of her mind she counts the shots Dembe fires in the direction of their attacker and when he stops to reload she hears herself say, "Does he have a plan?"

"What?"

"Does he have a plan for this? For if he's hurt?"

Dembe doesn't keep firing, he checks their perimeter and holsters his gun.

"The plan is too slow," he says, "He was expecting trouble but not like this."

"Hospital then," she says, and her voice is steady, decisive. Alien.

But the next piece of the day is missing. She doesn't know how they get him into the back of the car. The next thing she remembers is kneeling in the footwell in the back of the sedan pressing as hard as she can against his chest over her ruined scarf and her shin is throbbing like she hit it hard at some point and Red is gasping and trying to regain consciousness. She remembers thinking the word pneumothorax and knowing she couldn't do anything more than she was already doing. She remembers that she couldn't look at his face all contorted and bloody or her teeth would buzz and everything would start to grey out. She remembers thinking she wished he'd slip unconscious again so he'd stop trying to fight her holding him down and trying to keep his blood in.

She remembers hoisting him between herself and Dembe and stumbling in the emergency room doors and the swarm of nurses and residents practically levitating him out of their grasp and following the gurney as far as she and Dembe were allowed. She remembers Dembe taking her arm as their way was barred, like he expected her to force her way through or like he expected her to fall over.

She remembers calling after them, "Clean his face— please, he doesn't like to be— please just, as soon as you can."

Dembe put a hand on her back after that and steered her away to the waiting area. From him it felt a lot like comfort. She wasn't sure how he could be so kind to her after the blow up she'd just had with Red. She wasn't sure how he could be so kind and still be so loyal to a man like Red.

She'd drawn up short at that, feeling something like an electric shock at such a spiteful thought when she was still sticky with his blood. Of course Red was more than one thing, of course, of course, he was the good things and the bad things, it was just that it was easier not to think about all of them all of the time. It was just that every time he tried to tell her a new awful truth she lost her mind, it was like someone cutting off her air supply and leaving her floundering in the dark. There had never been anyone who could hurt her so deeply, so easily, and when he did she couldn't think.

It was only later, after some of her ability to reason returned, that she would remember that every time he gave up some new dark thing, his face was all of pain and sorrow. That he'd spoken to her so gently and owned up to his actions, not tried to press justifications on her — unlike every other man she'd known who were so quick to try to get excused of their responsibility, make her admit they were justified. No, he would let her think the worst of him, the very worst, and sometime later it would become clear that it was an assumption he didn't truly deserve, that there were reasons for everything he'd done, that had nothing to do with selfishness or evil, and he hadn't even tried to air them to her.

Usually it would take her days, even weeks to realize this. But this time, now, with her head full of the buzzing noise of not thinking, and Red's blood dried under her fingernails, she realizes over and over again.

She'd never been sure if the good things or the bad things in him outweighed the other, but now he'd come damn close to bleeding out on the back of his luxury car and the equation of his morality — which had always been tallying away in the back of her mind even when she tried to say she was done with him — evaporated between one breath and the next.

It was necessary that he live. It was necessary.

She remembers asking where she could wash her hands and after that was another piece of time that is entirely blank.

* * *

They had ended up at the same hospital Tom that had been in after Zamani had tried to gut him. Sheer coincidence, and it takes her more than an hour to realize it. It had been closest and they _needed _ close. When she realizes she starts laughing in a way that feels like gasping and then she has to sit down on the floor.

The nurse she'd been talking to hustles her into a chair instead and takes her pulse and advises her to take slow, deep breaths but Liz knows better what her body can withstand and takes her wrist back. She hasn't fainted or cried or thrown up, she'd bluffed them through on her credentials and Dembe's knowledge of Red's medical history and kept her body moving through the places when her brain simply cut out and refused to take in any more.

* * *

Red is in surgery. He's going to be fine. They had to open his chest. He's got an incision and his ribs are going to hurt and he's not going to be able to move very much for a pretty long time, which is a problem because they're going to _have _to move him somewhere secure as soon as possible. He lost a lot of blood and was going to be out for a while. But he's going to be fine.

She calls in to the team at some point and her voice sounds normal to her own ears. She is surprised somewhere in the vagueness of her mind at her own equanimity. It's a short conversation, the actual information that she has to pass on is nearly nonexistent, but Ressler hands her off to Cooper at some point and he makes her repeat it and tells her to stay put and keep reporting back since she'd managed to get the hospital staff to keep her in the loop — she doesn't tell them they only took pity on her after seeing that she was traumatized and more than a little pathetic — and that scene techs will be heading out to process the site of the shooting. It wasn't likely they'd find anything, of course but they'd try anyway.

Ressler tries to ask her how she is when he gets the phone back but she hangs up on him. She won't keep coping if she has to think about how she is. Her own state of mind doesn't interest her. Her shin still stings and throbs now and then, but it's reassuring in a way. Something else to think about.

Dembe's doing a little better than she is, she thinks. He stays with her the whole time, though he paces with the precision and gravity of a military drill and he checks the exists compulsively. The hospital thinks he's FBI too, it was the only way to keep him armed.

He's made a number of quiet phone calls on his cell and she thinks he's probably setting up some private facility to move Red to where they won't be such sitting ducks, but Red has to come out of surgery and recovery before they can do anything. She doesn't ask because talking requires listening and staying in the overwhelming present which she can't seem to manage.

Dembe had gone to get the case with the fulcrum in it while she'd been washing up and now she sits with it tucked beneath her chair in the waiting room they've got to themselves. There isn't a second that she isn't aware of it's presence there, like a bomb, like something fragile and priceless she has to protect.

She'd thought for too long how this little device was going to be her trump card, her collar and leash to make Red do whatever she wanted, just as soon as she figured out how to use it as leverage, or what it was she wanted from him. That thrill of power had spurred her on and on. She'd been so unwilling to relinquish it. But she'd left it too late, hoarding the feeling of potential for so long that she'd missed the moment to spend it when it could do any good.

Now she's in the middle of a mess she doesn't understand and Red's under anesthesia in the operating room and she feels so, so unsheltered, more terribly exposed and vulnerable than she ever has in her life. She's seen him walk through a hail of bullets unscathed on more than one occasion, she'd thought him impervious to the vagaries of mortality but now she when closes her eyes, there he is, bleeding and struggling for air under her hands in the back seat of his car. It didn't matter that she'd washed her hands raw, she still see it, him, every time.

She knows she should be strategizing about what happens next, but she doesn't have enough information about the fulcrum of the shadowy alliance of forces that Red was facing. She has no idea who she can trust, she doesn't know how much she can rely on her colleagues, on the team. She's so unmoored, she doesn't even know how to make her way out from behind the film of static that seems to stand between her and the reality happening around her.

Dembe keeps asking her if she's alright, at regular intervals, she thinks, but it's hard to tell because she's not tracking time too well. She says she's fine each time and he never looks like he believes her.

He keeps pacing and she keeps tapping her heel against the tiny black hardside case that holds the fulcrum upon which — apparently — all their lives have turned these last twenty odd years. She spends a while watching how Dembe moves, his economic grace, the way his shoulders are so taught and his eyes just a little too wide, hyper-vigilant she would think if she were thinking in words right now. She wonders how many times he's had to keep this vigil while Red was hurt, because even so he's calmer than he would be if this were a new thing.

Neither of them are alright.

* * *

A doctor on Red's case comes and tells them he's out of surgery, he's in recovery, he's going to be under heavy sedation for the rest of the night because he's going to be having significant discomfort and they don't want him straining his stitches. 'Significant discomfort' means 'a lot of pain' and she knows it but she just nods. She doesn't get up, lets Dembe talk to the doctor for a while because she's got the fulcrum under her chair and she's paranoid that if she steps even two feet away from it, it's going to vanish in spite of the way they're the only ones in this waiting room. The doctor talks some more about Red's condition and she doesn't really listen, because she's never been squeamish before, has acclimated to a certain level of violence and wreckage in her life, but this kind of talk about Red's human, vulnerable flesh and bone is making her feel woozy.

Then he apologizes and tells them that since they're not actually family and the patient has already been through so much, they're not going to be able to see him until the tomorrow at the earliest. She isn't surprised, not really, and she feels a certain trepidation at seeing larger than life Red laid low in a hospital bed, but the disappointment is heavy in her just the same. She had wanted so badly to have something, anything, as long as he was clean of blood and not struggling in pain, to replace the horror of that car ride.

After the doctor leaves them again Dembe tells her quietly that they are going to get some rest, that additional protection for Red has been arranged here over night.

"You haven't moved for three hours," he says, low and gentle, sitting beside her for the first time that evening. She's still tapping her heel against the little case, now wedged partly under her foot, and Dembe surprises her by laying his warm hand lightly on her knee to still the fidget.

"I think that you're in shock," he says, "And you need to take care of yourself. The next several days are going to be very hard, and very long. Do you understand?"

She's ashamed of the profound relief she feels when she thinks of leaving the hospital. It feels like she's been given permission to stop doing this for a while, to stop being terrified and trying not to be terrified. She's so exhausted her that her chest aches and her head spins just from this one evening of worry. She nods slowly and her shoulders slump, the tight iron band around around her lungs loosen just a little.

"You don't have to chauffeur me you know," she tells him, and her voice sounds coarse from disuse. She hadn't said a word since the call to the blacksite ages ago. "I can make my own way."

Dembe gives her a skeptical look like she should know better than to think that would ever fly. "It won't be the same car," he says and pats her knee again before standing up and waiting for her to follow.

She does follow. He guessed right that she would only go with him if it wasn't that one, from before. She shied away even from the thought of it. But she goes with Dembe and asks him if he is willing to take her to her motel room for the night, and gets the answer she's expecting.

"We can pick up some of your things," he says, "But it's not safe for you to stay there. We don't yet know what is mobilized."

She gives in gracefully. Even if she had the energy she wouldn't argue, she liked Dembe's company and he wasn't a part of her power struggle with Red, not really. He'd made it clear in the past that even though he is Red's friend, he is sympathetic to the impossible position she's in. They are going to be facing this uncertain future together for a time, in any case, and she doesn't want him to think she's going to be obstructive. More obstructive than she already has been.

The weight of her own inaction and its consequences hangs on her, makes her hunch her shoulders and shuffle after Dembe, makes her throat ache and ache with frustration and helplessness. And as furious as she is, still, with Red, thinks she is, or would be if she could remember how, she knows he won't blame her for his shooting, or begrudge her even if he did, and this makes her ache, too.

* * *

It's stranger than she expected to spend a few minutes in her motel room. It's just as she left it after her meeting with Tom, and that surprises her too, she expected it to be rifled by him now that he knew where it was, or maybe one of Red's mysterious enemies but no. Just the same mess that she'd made the last few days. As she walks in she sees it as if from a distance, the tacky, dingy room, the piles of things in cartons. It all seems to belong to a stranger.

Dembe waits outside for her as she hurries to shower and change. She needs to wash the hospital and the fear off her skin. She finds, once she's stripped bare, that she'd badly scraped her shin, probably while clambering into the back of the car after Red. It must have hurt when she did it, she thinks, but that piece of time is still missing.

When she's dressed and toweled dry again, not very many minutes later, she packs bags and shoves things in boxes in a frantic rush. She's not taking it all with her tonight, she needs to travel light. But she is going to need to switch motels again, now that Tom knows where she is. She thinks he means it that he's going away, moving on, but he's lied so well to her so many times before. She doesn't want to be that easy to find.

There's only one truly valuable item, though and that's already packed up and guarded.

* * *

Red's safe house of the moment is the expansive top floor penthouse of a small industrial building turned into chic apartments, and since the conversion is still ongoing the rest of the building is empty. It's furnished but spare and modern and there are hardly any walls. It's restful but not cozy or comfortable. It's reassuring, at least, that if the safe house is breached they'll see them coming the second they make it throught the door. It isn't going to be a comfortable night though, she can tell. This secure and stylish place feels just as alien and unfriendly as her motel room did.

Dembe leaves her alone for a couple hours while he goes to get them some dinner. She suspects that he's meeting with someone and doesn't want her along, but she lets it go. The less she knows and therefore doesn't have to answer for not reporting, the better for the time being. Protecting Red is top priority right now. She doesn't ask herself why that is, it's just her reality.

She thinks she is going to get some rest until he gets back with the food but she finds herself pacing instead, checking every room of the penthouse over and over for intruders, knowing that the building was secure but not being able to shake off the overwhelming certainty that attack was imminent. She couldn't even tell if she was being paranoid or not, she just knew she was not in complete control of her body as she cleared room after empty room with her hand on her holster.

She hasn't slept much or well in weeks. She knows she is starting to come apart. Her heart is beating so hard she can feel it in her neck, her fingers, her cold and clenched stomach. Delayed shock, maybe, or the terror inside her going sideways and trying to find a way out. She is mostly sure that now is the time to stand down, that the attack, the worst has already happened, but she can't get her body to listen.

She makes herself sit down on the huge, low sectional in the main space of the loft and hold still, take slow breaths. By the time Dembe comes back she thinks she's shaken it off, enough to function anyway, but he gives her a look when he finds her carefully perched and staring into space. She must not appear any saner than she feels.

It's a long night.

* * *

They go back to the hospital first thing.

Dembe doesn't cajole her into eating a breakfast she can't stomach. He's already been up for ages, she's sure, by the time she stumbles out of her room. She feels hung over from lack of sleep. He hands her a mug of strong black tea with milk and honey and neither of them say a word to each other. They're out of the safe house and on the road less than half an hour later.

Dembe tells her she can leave her things for now, and she does.

This day feels different from the one before, the many before. From the moment she woke, up the hazy unreality of yesterday was gone. She is in her body again, everything is happening real and loud and immediate, and she's so eager to see Red again, even if he's unconscious. Just as long as he's not bloody and in danger any more.

But she's also dreading it because she has no idea what to say to him or what she's ready to hear from him. What he'd said about Tom, she's not ready to deal with. They have to strategize about the group coming for the fulcrum and she isn't terribly interested in that either, not right now.

There are men standing guard outside his room, she recognizes one of them from the rescue attempt when Garrick had Red. Down the hallway, a few feet away, Mr. Kaplan's there apparently lecturing the doctor she recognizes as the one who gave them updates the night before. Probably they're getting ready to move him, trying to get the hospital staff to play along with their unorthodox plan.

Dembe leaves her side to go back up Kaplan, and seized with a certainty that she won't see Red for days or weeks once they spirit him away somewhere safe and secure with all the best medicine and anonymity money can buy — she isn't trusted now, she knows that, Dembe's been nice to her but she broke with Red and they know that, she won't be included in future moves — she ducks into his room. The guards don't stop her. She gives them a look as she walks by and they don't stop her.

And then there she is, clutching her coat like a security blanket, alone in the tiny green and cream hospital room with a sleeping Red. It's a private room at least, she thinks, looking around, but it's shabby and depressing and barely big enough to open the door without hitting the guardrail at the foot of the bed and it stinks of lemon clorox with it's sickly smell of bleach and there are _machines _and wires. Red's really out of it, so still in the big bed, his lips parted slightly, his eyes shadowed, his chin faintly stubbled. It's his hands that get to her, his big, eloquent, always in motion hands are limp and idle against the bedclothes almost as though dropped and forgotten, with a grey plastic oxygen monitor clipped to one finger like a sick person, an injured person, an invalid.

She hears herself make a strange noise, something strangled and dismayed and half-swallowed. She almost turns and flees, but leaving would be worse. She bypasses the bed and opens the cheap metal blinds on the small window. At least he is afforded this, though it looks out over the parking lot and suddenly she's glad he's going to be taken somewhere better to recuperate, even if she isn't sure she'll be welcome there.

The natural light helps, he looks more healthy than under the fluorescents. His face is clean at least, she notes as she slowly approaches, and his skin is pink and right, not grey from blood loss.

She'd had dreams. Fitful, awful dreams that plagued her little sleep the night before. More like little phantoms from the day's horrors but echoing and endless and growing steadily worse. It takes seeing him, here in real life, sleeping and ordinary, to make her realize that she'd begun to believe those dreams as much as her memories.

Her mind has been playing tricks lately, she knows that, she knows she's slipping away into a morass of faulty thinking and faulty memories and irrational choices but even as she's seen herself slipping away on the current she hasn't been able to do anything, stop herself. Instead she's drifted, and kept Red as her one fixed point. Whether or not they were getting along at any given moment his very presence was immutable. His roles as savior and task master and antagonist and voice of temptation were interchangeable but there was never a moment in this last year and a half where he hadn't been at least one to her, taking up her attention.

But then he'd declared himself her greatest betrayer — and then he'd been shot. Shot in the street. The crack of the gun going off replays itself in her head, did so all night. He'd crumpled, standing one second, on the ground the next and she'd made a noise then too, an animal shriek of despair because she'd thought, for as long as it took her to scramble back out of the company car and come to her knees beside him in the road, that it could be a shot to the heart or the head, final and irreversible. She'd dreamed him twisted and gasping under her hands and she'd dreamed him white and still and cold, and even in her dreams and _dying _he was all she could see.

She sits down with a thump in the visitor's chair under the window. She wants to laugh at herself and how many times her legs have failed her in the last 24 hours. She bites her lip instead, lets her head fall back against the wall and keeps breathing.

He starts to stir in his blankets, head shifting against the pillows. They are small, slow movements of a groggy person struggling their way up from sleep.

"Who's there," he says, and his voice is gravelled and low but there's force behind it, and she realizes that she's hidden from him in the corner of the room, he can't see her sitting where she is around his monitors and bed rail.

She stands. It takes her a second to climb past her jangling nerves and her winded, overwrought body doesn't feel like moving but she stands. She walks up to his bedside with short, hesitant steps and watches his face as it transforms watching her. The expression that rises in his face is a little sluggish from the drugs but more open, too. She doesn't think anyone has ever looked at her with such joy, such reverence and love.

"Lizzie," he says.

And that's when she starts crying. Not sweetly or quietly but awful panting sobs she tries to muffle behind her hand. She thinks of leaving but all the fight's gone out of her. Somehow the impact of the last days has caught up with her all at once, like a body blow. She turns away, not wanting him to see her cracked open and hysterical and reacting to a crisis that's already over.

"Lizzie, Lizzie, no," he says, trying to get her attention, trying to sooth her even from his sick bed, "It's not as bad as it looks. We're safe for now. Don't worry, everything will be alright."

"No," she says, shakes her head, takes a while to get control of her breathing.

"It will," he insists, "Lizzie, can you please come back over here and look at me? I'm not going to have this conversation at your back."

She scrubbed at her face before turning to him. She's tired of putting on her worst moments in front of Red, he provokes them it seems sometimes, stirs her to a depth of feeling that she is otherwise able to avoid. She turns back.

He still looks drowsy, and human, maybe like he's fascinated by the sight of her and maybe like he's confused about what on earth she'd doing crying at his bedside when he's going to be _fine._

"You're going to be fine," she says, to try it out.

He nods slowly. "I think I remember a doctor telling me that, earlier," he says.

She wipes at her cheeks again and snuffles and she knows her eyes are swollen and she feels like a child, like she just can't stop feeling the loss that didn't happen yesterday but only missed by seconds.

"I have the— Dembe has the, um… thing," she says, to reassure him, that she doesn't mean to be stingy with it now, but she doesn't intend to say the word _fulcrum _out loud in public, even in his guarded room.

"Alright," he says, with a little nod and a little like he's trying to catch up, or like she's talking about something entirely beside the point, "Good."

She hasn't shaken off the paranoia as much as she'd hoped, but maybe it's justified. With Red like this, recuperating and gravely injured, it feels like the roof's been torn off the small shelter she'd thought unbreachable. In spite of herself she had begun to rely on the idea that, even if all else failed her and she was in danger, Red would take care of it, but now she's the one who will have to step in and be the one taking care and she has no idea what to do. She's too raw and tumbled about. But she knows she can't get it wrong, it's too important.

"You are necessary," she says, her voice a creaky, over-earnest thing and it's a stupid sort of declaration for a brightly lit hospital room early in the morning. Too much, too personal, too intimate and she wants to suck it back in the moment she says it but it's true. Necessary is the only word she has for it, she can't say she's fond of him, what she feels is too biting for that, too full of claws and hunger and bone-gnawing persistence. She can't say she hates him either or keeps him as her enemy, no enemy could know her so well, or she him, no antipathy could be so wide and warm and full. No, necessity is the best she has, all she can admit to in the flood-tide of her despairing. "You didn't tell me it was _your life _in the… in the matter of 'life and death.' Why didn't you— no, that's not what I… You take too many dumb risks, and I need you to _not do that anymore, _alright? You have too many people who. Just, I need you to, okay, I need you to be here."

"I am here," he reaches out a hand towards her and then winces because really, he shouldn't be moving that arm, why they don't have it in a sling she can't understand — so she rushes forward to take it, to keep him from straining, she tells herself — and waits until she's too focused on him to keep crying and scolding, or maybe waits until his groggy brain catches up to her distressed babbling. "I've recovered from worse. And at the moment I feel just fine. No, no, it's true, they must have listened to Dembe about my high tolerance. Normally I'd have to pay a small fortune to someone with the right connections to feel this good."

"God, Red, can't you be serious? Why can't you ever just be straight with me? If I'd known you were in so much danger I never would have…" she can't find words for the maneuvering she'd been doing that didn't sound shameful.

"It's alright, Lizzie. I tried to play you so you tried to play me. It's only fair, Sweetheart."

"You got _shot," _she says, alarmed, pulling her hand away, not liking such a blunt characterization.

"I know," he says, "That happens sometimes when you play in the big leagues. But let me be clear here, it is absolutely not your fault."

"Were you really just… playing me?" she asks, in spite of all the accusations she's lobbed at him, she just doesn't buy it.

"Yes," he says, almost defiant and then softens, "I was trying to have the good things and keep back the bad things, I was trying to control what you saw of me because I thought it would make you… like me a little better, I suppose, trust me enough to get through this," he says and sighs and let the silence hang.

"What we've been doing, these have been the good things?" she asks, incredulous. She sits on the edge of his bed without thinking, and after a moment it feels alright, not comfortable or natural but good just the same.

"No… not, the good things, no. Though there have been times…" a faint smile steals over his face, and there's that look again, that loving, longing look.

"Yeah," she says, quietly, and she thinks they're probably looking off away at the same memories, with the same poignancy and sweetness, "There have been times."

She bows her head under the weight of it, the naked, wistful, hope she sees in him. He's injured and drugged and there's no way this is an act, and she had tried to break him to her will over that tiny gadget from their past, to get even, to get one up. This, this from him, the way he looks at her, gently rubs her arm in comfort, this is all she'd wanted, really and she'd tried to get it by force. It never even occurred to her to try any other way.

"They're working on getting you transferred somewhere more secure," she says, instead of continuing on a subject that's too taxing for them both, "Am I going to be able to visit you there?"

"Do you want to?" he asks, the note of uncalculated surprise in his voice stings her, "You don't have to visit just to humor me, or your guilty conscience."

"Yes, I want to," she says, "And not just because we're going to need something like a strategy, soon."

"Then visit. I always love your company, Lizzie," he says sincerely, matter of fact, and she just nods.

She envies his ability to say things like that without falling over himself to prove it doesn't mean anything, it didn't really matter the way she does. She wants it to matter, it does matter so much. She feels paralyzed with how much it matters to her, and she feels selfish for it but she thinks Red's recuperation is going to be one of the most difficult things she's ever going to live through.

"I'll be there, then," she says, at last, "As much as you want me."


End file.
